Call for Papers: Michigan College English Association Conference on Zoom on Saturday, October 5, 2024
Themes: Crisis and Resilience
Featured Speaker: Dawn Burns, fiction writer and memoirist*
Psychologist Laura Campbell-Sills argues that resilience goes beyond the ability to survive adversity, writing: “Resilience is seen as more than simple recovery from insult (Bonanno, 2004); rather it can be defined as positive growth or adaptation following periods of homeostatic disruption (Richardson, 2002)” (2006). In 2024, we continue to struggle with new waves of COVID-19 and the lingering social, psychological, and educational effects of the shutdown, as well as violence on our campuses, political polarization, and the splintering of our civil society. We also face the challenge of generative Artificial Intelligence, such as ChatGPT, to writing as we understand it. How will we as educators confront these crises and go beyond “simple recovery” to finding the possibilities for “positive growth or adaptation”? We welcome papers from a pedagogical perspective, creative responses to the themes of Crisis and Resilience, and literary analysis of works with these themes.
The Michigan College English Association welcomes proposals from experienced academics, young scholars, and graduate students. We encourage a variety of papers, including pedagogical work, scholarly essays, creative writing, as well as workshops, crafting circles, and other activity-directed sessions. All proposals will be peer-reviewed. Participants do not have to live in Michigan or the United States, though we often feature in-state work.
We are also seeking documentarians to attend the sessions, take notes and write short reports to share with the Board in the weeks following the conference. The reports of last year’s documentarians were invaluable and went beyond our expectations, so consider carrying on this new tradition!
We will be reviving the old MCEA tradition of $50 cash awards to graduate students: one for best essay, one for the best creative reading. Any participant wishing to submit work to the contest should send a complete scholarly paper or creative piece to Ed Demerly at edemerly@aol.com
Here are some possible areas for presentations:
■ fiction, poetry, drama, creative nonfiction
■ classroom management
■ curriculum development
■ computer or on-line instruction
■ race, class, and gender studies
■ literacy
■ professional expectations, evaluation, and assessment
■ English/writing departments and our society
■ the creative process
■ union/administration differences
■ film studies
■ textual analysis
■ preparing students for the work world
■ teaching composition, literature, linguistics
Conference proposals are due by September 21, 2024. Early submissions are welcome. Please send your name, university affiliation, e-mail address, time preference, and a 200-word abstract or sample of creative writing to Program Chairs Ilse Schweitzer, Cheryl Caesar and Lori Burlingame via email at schwei53@msu.edu, caesarc@msu.edu and lburlinga@emich.edu. To submit a panel proposal, please include the information for all members (5 maximum participants) in the same proposal.
Topic Tags: call for papers, Michigan College English Association, conference, Crisis, Resilience, generative AI, teaching, creative writing, composition, literature, linguistics
*Dawn Burns is thoroughly Midwestern, having lived her whole life in Indiana, Ohio, and Michigan. Often her characters are Midwestern too, like Evangelina McQuarry from Elkhart, Indiana, who may appear simple and uncomplicated but has a rich inner life in Evangelina Everyday (2022).
Dawn’s MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Notre Dame prepared her for a lifetime of writing, creative community building, and teaching. Dawn is founder of the SwampFire Retreat for Writers and Artists, and a recipient of excellence awards from the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature and the Ohio Arts Council. An assistant professor at Michigan State University, Dawn is committed to writing and storytelling as acts of personal and social change both in and beyond her First Year Writing classroom. She is actively seeking publication for her book Born Beneath Pedro’s Sombrero, Raised in a Corn Palace: Tales from the National Association of Tourist Attraction Survivors.
